New small autonomous schools initiatives have spread to urban districts nationwide. While their designs vary, these initiatives generally aim to convert large public high schools into multiple, smaller, more autonomous schools and to create new small autonomous public schools of various types. Initiative advocates argue, in part, that the sheer diversity of students in urban districts – and, arguably, other mid-sized to large districts – increases the urgency to reinvent schools into newer, smaller, more autonomous units that are more rigorous, caring, and responsive to individual students.

In turn, district central offices would expand student learning districtwide if they helped schools build their capacity for making key decisions about how to support their students, rather than mainly directed schools’ decisions. Such forms of district central office support depart starkly from traditional central office roles as regulators of or non-participants in reform efforts. What, more specifically, do urban school district central offices do when they enable the implementation of new small autonomous schools initiatives?

Educational research has shed little light on this question. For example, many studies of new small autonomous schools initiatives focus on school-level outcomes and implementation processes (e.g., American Institutes for Research & SRI International 2003, 2004; Sporte, Correa, Kahne & Easton 2003; Darling-Hammond, Ancess & Ort 2002; Raywid 2002; Raywid, Schmerler, Phillips & Smith 2003; Wallach & Gallucci 2004; Wallach & Lear 2003). Such studies typically argue that central offices – and usually formal central office policies such as mandated curriculum – curb implementation. However, such studies generally do not reveal how central offices might enable implementation.

These studies are also limited because they tend to draw their conclusions about central offices from a handful of one-time interviews with central office administrators or surveys of school principals regarding what and how well their central offices are doing. Single self-reports and principals’ reports provide important perspectives on central office participation. But, especially since most central office work unfolds over time and beyond the view of school principals, such data sources are significantly incomplete in what they teach about how central offices might participate more productively in implementation. Other research on districts suggests that individual central office administrators’ relationships with schools may be more consequential to implementation of ambitious change initiatives than formal policy changes (e.g., Burch & Spillane 2004; Honig 2006).

Given these considerations, I concluded that a next generation of research on new small autonomous schools initiatives should focus on central office administrators who aim to enable implementation and aim to reveal what they do and how they do it. Such administrators were likely to find few roadmaps for their work and discover that they must invent their work on the job. Accordingly, research should focus attention on districts where central office administrators stood a good chance of having the resources, political support, and freedom to invent their work in ways that promised to enable implementation.